The arrests of seven mayors in Venezuela show how President Nicolás Maduro’s government has weaponized the supposed fight against organized crime to achieve its political ends.
More than a third of the 21 municipal mayors of the state of Zulia have been detained since October 2024.
The most recent arrest came on April 2, when intelligence officials detained Indira Fernández, mayor of the Guajira municipality. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello linked her and six other mayors to an alleged drug trafficking network accused of importing almost 32 tons of cocaine that has been seized this year.
The latest of those seizures, more than 15 tons seized in the city of Los Puertos de Altagracia on April 8, followed the 5.4 ton seizure near Zulia’s border with Colombia in mid-March, which Cabello had suggested was a record.
The network was part of a scheme involving opposition leader María Corina Machado and former Colombian presidents Álvaro Uribe and Iván Duque that sought to use paramilitary forces to topple Maduro, Cabello claimed during a press conference on April 4.
“It is an operation of corruption, conspiracy, terrorism, and drug trafficking, because they are linked,” Cabello said, adding that he would wait until the case is brought to court to present any proof of his claims.
Four of the mayors arrested in connection with the supposed plot belong to Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – PSUV) and three to the opposition. An eighth Zulia mayor, Nabil Maalouf, has also been in custody since December, but Cabello did not link him to the alleged drug trafficking operation.
The arrests come ahead of May’s regional elections. Given that the now-former mayor of Zulia state capital Maracaibo, Rafael Ramírez Colina, has not been seen since being detained in October and is believed to be in the notorious prison that houses political and high-profile prisoners known as the Helicoide, there is little chance that those arrested will be able to campaign for reelection.
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With regional elections less than two months away, the arrests are likely a play for total control over Zulia, a state of significant criminal and political importance.
The state’s location across the border from the coca hub Catatumbo in Colombia means it is central to Venezuelan cocaine trafficking operations. But while Cabello has claimed to have delivered a blow to the international narcotics market, his own alleged involvement in drug trafficking, along with that of the Venezuelan military and the Colombian guerrilla group the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), an ally of Maduro’s government, suggests another motive behind the arrests: unchallenged control of cocaine trafficking routes.
“They need more control in all those municipalities that border where it is said that drugs pass through,” said one Zulia politician who spoke to InSight Crime on the condition of anonymity.
Maduro is keen to establish a firmer political grasp over Zulia, the country’s most populous state and one of only four with an opposition governor, to prevent opposition movements from springing up.
Smearing a political target by associating them with organized crime is a common Maduro tactic, and the arrests of opposition mayors fits the pattern of political repression following Maduro’s July 2024 reelection, which was widely decried as fraudulent.
The president named Diosdado Cabello as “supreme chief” of Zulia on March 6. Without clarifying which powers the grandiloquent title would afford him, Maduro stated Caballo would be tasked with “reuniting all the patriotic, revolutionary, Bolivarian, Chavista, democratic, and honest currents of Zulia,” suggesting a desire to gain firmer control of the PSUV ahead of May’s elections.
By targeting members of its own party, the government can present itself as tough on corruption regardless of party affiliation.
The arrests may also give the president and Cabello a chance to “clean the slate,” politically speaking, and guarantee that only Maduro loyalist’s run for election. Notably, three of the four arrested PSUV mayors have close ties to disgraced former governor Omar Prieto, who has not been put forth as a candidate this year, despite having run in 2021’s gubernatorial election.
“It could be that Cabello eliminated mayors who were in Omar’s camp in this way,” the politician told InSight Crime. “And that would obviously clear the way for him by putting in people loyal to him.”
Featured image: Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello at a press conference on April 4. Credit: People’s Ministry of Interior, Justice and Peace (MPPRIJP).
